Opposing view: GitHub's changing of `master` to `main` as the name of the default remote branch was not necessary and a huge waste of time for all parties involved.
I still can't get over this. The word master has like 10 definitions and because one of them is part of a distasteful part of history that has nothing to do with the way it was used in this context, they inconvenience everyone.
I don't like taking things literally, but in this case that would be necessary, as it's the whole point. "Master" is an English word. If it isn't, "main" is primarily translated to "haupt" in German, and we all know what a Haupttruppführer was, so that should go too, as should every other word that possibly has a negative connotation somewhere in the world.
What does this have to do with the discussion, unless as an illustration of what an "opposing view" could be, which surely no-one had trouble imagining?
The consensus seems to have gelled (few years ago, give or take a few years?) around every single open source project needing to have a specific "community guidelines" document - it was the new vogue established over the past few years by the body politic, and this lead to various promoters of new social paradigms to rename things that were taken at face value, i.e. "master-slave" in the context of database client-server architectures, or "master" branch as primary branch, etc.
These changes are trivial in retrospect, but contextually, the reversion of "participants will be tolerant of opposing views" seems to validate the notion that maybe excessive discourse around social mores aren't appropriate within the substructure of "writing new code that works, backporting features that are useful for others, etc"
The conflating of social justice goal-setting and software development is a swing and a miss, and if that's not completely clear by the context then I just want to apologize for stating what seems obvious to an external observer.
I understood what you meant and agree. I believe many social justice obsessed individuals have become their own worst enemy as they view every unrelated topic an attack on their personal perspective.
